Selective memory under COVID-19 and Freud.

I still remember the first time I came to the store, I quenched my thirst and hunger with a delicious tuna pastie. I sat on the edge of the store and said "Time to pay." My anguish increased dramatically when I discovered that I did not bring my wallet. I turned to see the shopkeeper whose tender look and sweetely told me "Don't worry, I know where you live. Go get the money and you can bring it to me."

I understood then that moral credit and trust are things that can be understood and that certainly depend on human will. What are those concepts like now that we can't toast as often? Is there already a report from NASA or RAND about a new modification to the 6 handshakes or 6 degrees of freedom rule? Could it be that it is now 3,4,5 or simply Zooming between 3 to reduce friction in the negotiations? Digital transformation and the pandemic are changing many things irreversibly.

Even the memory itself and the inherent confidence that fuels memory is altering. How many times has it not happened to you that some years later after you introduced a friend to someone you find out that after years them now have children together or even that they have already been divorced and not even invited to the wedding?

With my father-in-law, a lot of those events happens to me. He calls me for some reason and I recommend him to a friend or collaborator. Things are moving forward and I do not care. Before long, my father-in-law would organize a meal and tell me "You are going to meet someone very interesting." And he was precisely the friend that I had introduced to him years before. In the family environment that happens more and more, sometimes Alzheimer's is responsible, in others it is simply a phenomenon of human nature, involuntary.

Problems start when business is the issue and when memory is selective. And I do not know if many more have happened just to me during the pandemic, but now it is almost every day to receive good news from alliances that even in the complicated virtual realities that we live are happening and also in the bad news, the breaking of commercial alliances, the non-transparent actions of the behavior of some supposed professionals and professionals ones. I think the opacity inherent in this physical distancing has even affected the ethics of many people.

And it is quite painful to realize that even though people should understand that these circumstances should be a real opportunity - even literary - to be able to dabble in new and better practices. The lapidary phrase of "Now that the pandemic is over" has even become the epigraph. of friendships.

Each of the niches behave differently. In business, alliances are dissolved according to interests guided by money, few are those who invest in long-term personal relationships unlike, for example, the time invested in talented people. Very strange things happen in the academy. For example, it will always be more interesting to have a collaboration thousands of kilometers away than with the director of the laboratory next to my office, since I may compete for the jug of water or it bothers me if their meetings are quite noisy . I have even had to introduce colleagues from the same american university at meetings in Mexico. And that is normal, physical closeness is not a guarantee to have the humor to greet all your neighbors. But now that physical closeness loses its relevance, what are the new challenges?

I am not especially a Networking Guru, although life has led me to live and work in 8 different countries, I have always liked to make the connections between those who can support each other. I am not one of those who seek to optimize or monetize social interactions the first time, however several of my friends still call me to help them close negotiations.

But in recent months I have been worrying about how many business partners and friends are behaving, who like my father-in-law, their memory slips and becomes very selective, thinking that luck will prevent the return to the new normal from putting things in their place.

Or is it a new pathology due to Covid-19? momentarily I have called it the Alzheimer's Covidong. I hope there will be a cure as quickly as possible, if not, the new normal will force us to even review each and every one of our friends and business partners with scrutiny worthy of an exhaustive COVID test.